General Comments – Page 13

Apple iPhone review and wish list

25 May, 2008Hal

I know that the iPhone has been out since last November, but I only got one at the beginning of this month. In that short time I can honestly say this little device has changed the way I work. Not only does it give me access to my emails with a reasonable data connection, but it gives me the most seductive interface I’ve yet used. Two staff at Cleveratom now use the iPhone, and another is seriously considering it.

A lot has already been written about most of this stuff, and I’ll probably not say anything new. The Edge network is slow compared to 3G, and a 3G iPhone is about to emerge from Apple, if you believe all the rumours. Hence my 1 month old gadget will be out of date in no time at all, such is the way with technology. However, before the iPhone I didn’t even have an Edge connection, I refused to pay the extortionate costs for accessing the internet through my old phone, and managing email on the go was a joke. The iPhone has at least given me a connection I can afford and some excellent tools to manage the things I need to manage. So why complain about any of that?

There are some areas where I think there could be improvements, and again, lots of this has already been said. However, it’s worth repeating from a user’s perspective that whilst the iPhone is a massive improvement over my old Sony Ericsson, and a massive improvement over the call plan I was on, there are some simple wins which I think Apple could make with this soon to be outdated gadget.

Let’s make a list:

the ability to select and mark as read a whole lot of emails in one go, instead of managing them one at a time.
the ability to send a contact to another person
have a link through to contacts on the home screen instead of within the ‘phone’ app
Be able to set a default page in safari
better spam filtering (well, to be fair, ANY spam filtering)
ability to remove a single call record from the calls list
ability to forward an SMS to other people, or at least convert the content of an SMS to an email and forward that

Then there are the simple things I used to enjoy, such as the ability to write an SMS from my mac book pro and send it using the phone. I have been using the excellent ‘BluePhoneElite‘ for this purpose up until now, but the iPhone doesn’t play well with that, yet.

Basically, the more integrated the phone is with my laptop, the better it becomes for me. There is a suggestion that the phone’s data connection could be accessed by a laptop and then we’d have permanent internet access from any machine. However, I think that is only going to undermine the phone’s abilities, and perhaps we should avoid doing that.

Matt came up with a suggestion too -and that is for the calendar to link to the ‘favourites’ list in the phone functions so that if there is a contact listed in an event that the phone number for the contact gets put into the favourites list for three days, the middle of which would be the day of the event. This is actually a cool suggestion, I think. The number of times you need to speak to a person before and after an event would merit such a piece of functionality, I think.

And then there is the idea of the developer community now able to make apps for the phone. I think this is simply awesome and we will almost certainly be swimming in such things before too long. However, with that power comes the responsibility (to paraphrase someone else) to ensure the apps are good quality and needed, not just trite and uninteresting to all but a few people.

One of the very simple things I have found when using the phone is the ability to add web pages to the ‘Home Screen’ of the phone – a little like adding a bookmark but making it very obvious. The thing here is that the phone will take a snapshot of the web page and convert it into an icon for the phone, unless the website itself has already declared an iPhone icon in the root folder… a little like a favicon works. Such icons need to be made 57px square and labelled correctly for them to work, but when done properly they are superb ways to get to your favourite sites very quickly. Given that teh iPhone can have three sets of screens as the home screen (just flick across the screen to move between them), this makes a lot of sense.

In conclusion, this is a superb tool for lots of reasons, but it certainly has room for improvement. I wouldn’t complain about al the missing features though, as I didn’t have them before (mostly) and I can only list them because I see potential, not because I feel cheated. there are plenty of folk who think of the iPhone as a gimmick, and some who feel it is not yet worthy of buying as they can do more with other phones (Nokia N95, perhaps), but I would say that they couldn’t do them in as sexy a way as they could with the iPhone. The thing is way too nice to use, and far exceeds any other touch screen interface I have used on any other phone. I am sure the comptetition will play catch up, and that can only be good for the consumer, but until then I’m delighted with the phone, with the features and with the thought that it can get even better still.

BBC Micros Live On! Geordie Racer runs once more!

29 April, 200829 April, 2008Hal

Today I’d like to give a special vote of thanks to Ridgeway Primary School in South Croydon, particularly to Geoff Blyth, who arranged for me to pick up some old and dusty BBC Masters, BBC ‘B’s and Cub monitors, along with software, floppy drives and manuals. It was all donated freely to Cleveratom so that we could extend and develop the rather innovative ‘BBC Micro News’ project.

The BBC Micro computer is 25 years old this year and has been the stalwart of many a school computing lab, or classroom computer. The device was always streets ahead of its time, but as with all things technology changed, development ceased, newer machines became available and life generally goes on. Many a BBC was consigned to a skip, never to be used again.

And what a shame that was, for all the wrong reasons! As a teacher in the late 80’s and early 90’s I definitely didn’t know very much about the BBC computers. I didn’t appreciate the ability they had, and apart from the excellent ‘Logo’ language and a range of associated input and output modules, including sensors and motors, I actually despised many of the programs available.

How wrong I was to think like that! Today, Ridgeway Primary School (and Geoff) helped me complete a level of understanding I have been missing for a generation. Today, in amongst all of the bits and bobs, was a copy of ‘Geordie Racer’!

I used to take a class of eager 8 year old children to the TV room at school and have them watch episodes of ‘Look and Learn’ the fabulous BBC series that brought us such greats as ‘Through the Dragon’s Eye’ and of course Geordie Racer. Children would merrily sing the opening music then sit glued to the screen as the story unfolded week by week. Once the episode was over it was back to the classroom to play the computer game. By today’s standards of Quake Engines 3D graphics and Wii consoles the games are very very dull. But back then, this was enthralling stuff as the children battled with Baz (the villain in the story) and picked up a huge number of literacy skills as they did so. As the teacher, I remember thinking that I really ought to find a way to turn down the music as it was soooo annoying, but today I went back in time and relived some classic memories.

Thanks to Geoff, we think these BBCs will be able to help us develop the innovative ‘BBC Micro News‘ website where BBC Micros read RSS feeds from the BBC web site in their very ‘Steven Hawkins’ voices, helped by a couple of more modern machines as they do so. This project started as a bit of a mental challenge and has grown into something more – quite what is not yet clear, only that we need to get this able to handle more requests soon.

There is much to do, of course, and we need to reset all of the hardware so that it will run the ‘BASIC’ program we need it to. In checking the machines today, most are in working condition with few, if any, ailments. Some keyboards are not quite fully working, one or two keys are missing, all of them are dirty and need cleaning, but even so, after years in storage, years of use in a busy school, and a bumpy ride from Croydon to Chelmsford, they ALL powered up!

So imagine my delight when we got to look at the diskettes that Geoff kindly donated – including a box of unopened 5.25″ floppies – and found Geordie Racer, and found that it still ran (no pun intended). Fabulous stuff!

As we get more done, and the service becomes more reliable, I’ll post pictures and write about the developments. We will of course be crediting Ridgeway Primary School on the web site for their very kind donation. If anyone else has got any working BBC Micros (any model, but particularly ‘B’ or ‘B Plus’) then please do get in touch – especially if you have got old software to help us relive special memories!

Multimap and pop ups

14 February, 2008Hal

I am getting fed up with Multimap as a site. It used to be excellent, but they have tarnished themselves in my opinion by introducing unsolicited windows that appear in the background when you search for an address.

Why? It was pretty good before, but I am losing the will to continue visiting the site. As far as I’m concerned this is a pretty poor strategy from Multimap. Maybe others don’t feel so cheesed off by it, but for me it’s enough to make me turn to the AA web site instead.

Aperture Book Themes, changing the colour scheme

13 February, 200814 February, 2008Hal

One of the slightly annoying things about Aperture is the limitations placed on you when creating a book. Whilst it is incredibly flexible in lots of ways, certainly much more than iPhoto, there are some things I really want to be able to alter.

One of these is the colour scheme in the ‘Special Occasions’ Aperture Theme. By default, you get a pale blue colour for any panel not holding an image. It looks quite smart, and the ‘helvetica Neue Ultra Light font is smart too… but I often find I want to change it. The trouble is, Aperture doesn’t let you do so easily.

Of course, if you fancy digging around in the files for the app then almost anything is possible! It’s not exactly easy, and you should always make a copy of the theme and work on that rather than jigger around with a perfectly good one and break it, but all you need is an eye for colour (and design?) and a decent text editor. I use BBEdit, but you can do equally well with the free Text Edit that comes with your Mac.

First things first – what I am about to do is not recommended, and I take no responsibility for how your system runs after you try it 🙂 Seriously though, work on a back up copy of the theme, and you can always delete it later. Also, it is likely that even if you do change things now, any update to the software could well over write your hard work… this tutorial works with v1.5 of Aperture. Apple have only this week released v2 as an update and it boasts new book themes and capabilities. It seems like a good time for me to play with the current version I have got installed, then!
Show contents You find the book themes by control-clicking on the aperture application icon (in your Applications folder) and selecting ‘Show Package Contents’ . Navigate to ‘Contents/Resources’ and scroll down to the folder ‘Book Themes’. It’s probably quicker to type ‘book’ as you won’t then have to scroll – the finder will jump to the items with those letters at the start. You’ll then see the themes nicely lined up. Select the one you want to alter and make a copy of it (by holding down ‘Alt’ and dragging the folder to the bottom of the list). You can see that I have copied my ‘Special Occasions’ theme and renamed it ‘Alternate Occasions’. A word of caution – simply renaming the folder won’t give you a new theme name inside Aperture. It *will* list it alphabetically in the theme browser, but the theme list will show two copies of ‘Special Occasion’. We’ll get round to renaming things a bit later on.

Now you have the copy, open the folder and have a look. In my case, the first folder is called ‘Hardcover’ and everything else is in that. The things you may want to change are likely to be the fonts you can use and the colour of the bocks. For the fonts, look for the ‘TextStyles.plist’ file and open it in your text editor. What you’ll see is a series of XML statements which define the fonts in use, the size of them and the colour/style.

Changing Font Colours

TextString

I would leave the ‘Title’ key values alone. these are referenced in lots of other places and changing them here means an awful lot of editing elsewhere. You can also easily change the font in Aperture without needing to edit things here, but these keys control the default settings for the book, so you might want to tinker a little. Changing the default font is simply a matter of changing the key by typing in the name of the font you want to use. I have changed from ‘Helvetica Neue Ultra Light’ to ‘Garamond’.

You can also change the font colour in the last line of the set. These are actually RGB values with a fourth value set to ‘100’. RGB values are from 0 to 255 in each channel, with 0 being no colour, and 255 being maximum colour for each channel. Thus, a value of ‘255, 255, 255, 100’ would give you white text. Similarly, ‘0, 0, 0, 100’ gives you black text. If you have access to Photoshop or any other decent image editor, you probably already have a good idea how these things go. Again, you can easily change the colours of the fonts in Aperture without editing this file, but if you want to set up a new default, set the line as you need it to be.

In some areas kerning may be set, too. If you don’t know about kerning, leave this set as you find it!

Changing the colour blocks

If changing the fonts is not enough for you, how about finding the colour blocks and changing those? Open the ‘Graphics’ folder and look at the files there. The one I am interested in is ‘BlueRect.plist’. open this in the text editor and you will see a very much more simple set of code. All you need to do is change the value for colour, using the same system as above. For example, if you want a pale lilac block colour, set the values to be ‘235, 222, 241, 100’. Again, if you use Photoshop you can find these values very easily – use the colour picker tool and open up the colour setting dialogue. Move the target around in the colours and watch the RGB values change. When you have the colour you want, note the values and set them in the text file… easy!

Changing the Theme Name

So far we have been tinkering with the fonts and colours. You have already renamed the theme folder copy and when you make your book in aperture you get the new theme in the list of available books, but the name has stayed the same (despite renaming the folder). You can rename the theme so that it appears as you want in Aperture by simply opening the ‘Localizable.strings’ file found in the relevant ‘.lproj’ folder for your language. In my case, I open the ‘English.lproj’ folder where there is just one file. Open it in your text editor and look at the top of the file for the ‘Theme Name’ setting. Change it as you want and you are ready to go. You don’t need to change anything else in this file for the new theme to work.

Updating the Preview Image

Finally, to make your new theme easy to spot and have a nice icon from within Aperture, open up the ‘Preview.tiff’ file in your favourite image editor and make it look like your theme – change the colours, fonts or whatever. Even change the images to help identify it a little more. Save it back to its original location and you are done.

Restart Aperture

NewThemeBrowser

In order for your changes to show you need to re-start aperture. When it is running, try adding a new book and look at the list of options you now have. If all has gone according to plan, you should have your new theme showing in the list, ready to use.

If you combine your new theme colours with the existing ability in aperture to create new master pages then you have the opportunity to create some radical new layouts and over time I hope many people do.

Want to share themes?

Now you know how to edit your Aperture themes, why not provide a few for others to use? If ever there was an application crying out for additional content, this would be it, in my opinion! To get a new theme running, simply unzip it, put it in the ‘Book Themes’ folder and start Aperture. To get things going, have a copy of my ‘Alternate Occasions’ theme. It hasn’t changed much, just a font and colour change, but there is plenty more that could be done to make it more attractive. Over time, as new things change, I’ll update the file here.

AlternateThemeLilac

Heath Ledger

23 January, 200823 January, 2008Hal

ledger1 It was with great sadness that I learned of the death of Heath Ledger today. I have no remarkable stories to tell of knowing the chap, nor can I say that I was a massive fan of his work. Despite having only ever seen him in a handful of titles I have to say I had utmost respect for his talent. Moreover, my children still watch ‘A Knight’s Tale’ repeatedly, loving the story, the music and the characters, of which Heath Ledger is the lead.

What also saddens me is that such a young man (28, I believe) with such a promising future and respected back catalogue of work has been taken from us in such a way. Already the whisperings of drug abuse are filtering around the internet, amongst strong claims of a reaction to prescription drugs, or an accidental overdose. Whatever the cause, we are in a world where celebrities are elevated to unsustainable status and for some the way to deal with the immense pressure seems to be to find an outlet in drug use. Is this reasonable?

I feel a real sense of loss today, which is puzzling given my distinct lack of involvement with all things ‘Heath’ (apart from A Knight’s Tale each week almost), but nonetheless I am sad. My thoughts are with his family, particularly his daughter (Matilda) and those closest to him.

I only heard of his death when driving in to work and listening to the morning radio ‘crew’. Most had heard of Heath Ledger, but the ‘frontman’ of the show claimed not to have done, and was, in my opinion, less than generous in his comments about it all. It may well be that you have not heard of the fellow, Martin. It might be that you do not watch anything but blockbuster mainstream films (except, clearly, Brokeback Mountain), but regardless of your perceptions, the world has lost a talented actor through a drug related incident and is a duller place for all that. I would cut the family some slack right now, look at what Heath Ledger managed to achieve in his very short stay and celebrate some of that as a mark of respect, personally.